by Ken McNab
He said: ‘The interesting thing was he never talked about The Beatles. It was all about other stuff he was doing with Yoko. In fact, if you didn’t know any better you would never have thought he was a member of The Beatles. He saw himself more as a conceptual artist, which of course was what she was. He was all about her exhibitions. He wasn’t very Beatle-y at all. He was beginning to strike out on his own and carving his own identity as a solo artist. We bonded over old English comedies. We had a good old laugh on the plane but the jokes went right over Yoko’s head.’
Public reaction was mixed. One letter, in the Daily Express, alleged that Lennon had somehow committed treason by marrying a Japanese woman. The fans were, naturally, deeply divided. The Beatles’ American fan club made an appeal for tolerance: ‘Please try to understand that we should at least give Yoko the same chance we are giving Linda and that Maureen and Pattie got. If it makes John happy I guess we should be enthused as well.’ Linda McCartney would soon have good reason to treat those words with wry contempt.
*
On 21 March, without fanfare, Allen Klein was formally announced as business manager of Apple. Other than in the highbrow business pages of The Times and the Daily Telegraph, it barely rippled the surface compared to the acres of newsprint devoted to the McCartneys’ wedding, But it was a significant power grab nonetheless.
‘Everything changed when Klein took over . . . for a start Paul wasn’t there,’ recalled Neil Aspinall. The official announcement was made while McCartney was still on honeymoon, visiting his new in-laws in the States. A few days earlier, when the matter had been put to a vote, he had dispatched his solicitor, Charles Corman, to offer a token protest. It was a futile gesture. ‘I didn’t trust him and I certainly didn’t want him as my manager,’ was his succinct summing-up of Klein later. McCartney decided to stay away from Apple whenever Klein was there.
Klein had drawn up a cost-cutting plan to pull the company back from the brink. On the hitlist this month were several eye-catching company names: Aspinall, Peter Brown, Ron Kass, the head of Apple, Denis O’Dell, office manager Alistair Taylor and his namesake Derek, whose open-door press office was more like a never-ending bacchanal. Prominent they may have been, but their Apple salaries were nowhere near the super-tax bracket occupied by their employers. As Brown later noted, no one got rich while riding The Beatles coat-tails. Rather, Klein was more concerned with the influence some of them had over Lennon, Harrison and Starr. He was a master of the black art of manipulation and knew full well the value of playing one person against another. But Klein was canny enough to bide his time before turning the full weight of his arsenal on the key players at Savile Row. For example, the Lennons’ caviar account at Harrod’s remained untouched, as did Starr’s open-ended credit line at such noted London gambling joints as the Playboy Club and Les Ambassadors Club. And Taylor’s shelves continued to be replenished with the finest produce, from vintage wines and Scotch to the best weed in London.
Klein had outflanked the Eastmans and McCartney while continuing to mollify Lennon, Harrison and Starr with a succession of dubious ‘FYM’ – fuck you money – promises. The debacle over Nems continued to eat away at him, though. For all that John Eastman’s letter may have shredded any hopes of a deal with Clive Epstein, Klein still hoped to bring Leonard Richenberg and Triumph back to the negotiating table. He remained convinced that he could yet win back Nems, and save The Beatles a fortune in the process.
But there was, of course, a flipside to his ambitions. On his watch The Beatles had lost control of Nems while EMI had frozen £1.3m in royalties from sales of the White Album pending the legal outcome of his contretemps with Richenberg. It wasn’t the prettiest picture.
As always, Klein was ready to do what he did best – hustle on behalf of his clients for an improved royalty deal. He used a well-practised combination of bully-boy methods and scare tactics to browbeat cowering record company executives into coughing up the money that rightly belonged to those who were making it in the first place. It was a strategy that had worked successfully for Bobby Darin, Sam Cooke, The Animals, Donovan and, more recently, the Stones. Now, as he prepared to declare war on Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI, he had the biggest bargaining chip of all.
‘These boys want to work but you have to motivate them,’ he said as he prepared to sit down with Lockwood and EMI’s lawyers in the middle of March to renegotiate the band’s royalties deal with EMI and Capitol in America. The unspoken threat was that The Beatles could go on strike and, in the words of one observer, sing the national anthem backwards unless Klein got his way. But what Klein didn’t know was that another major battlefront was about to open up.
Dick James had become a millionaire several times over thanks to the Lennon and McCartney hits that made up Northern Songs. But, of late, Lennon’s public antics had appalled him, and now Harrison had been busted. Their behaviour was causing the stock price to wobble and James felt his primary obligation was to the three thousand shareholders of Northern Songs. So now, at the age of forty-nine, he was looking for a lucrative exit plan. Like Clive Epstein, loyalty to ‘the boys’ counted for more than a fat bank account, even though both were mutually bound to each other. But for months a cold chill had blown through his relationship with The Beatles. Since Brian Epstein’s death, he was no longer given a free pass to sit in on studio sessions at EMI. Indeed, Lennon had forcibly shown him the door when he called in unexpectedly at Twickenham during the rancorous rehearsals for ‘Get Back’.
The Beatles now saw him as just another ‘suit’ making money off their talent – a point made by Harrison in his witty putdown ‘It’s Only A Northern Song’. Their deal with the company was due to expire in 1973 and every instinct told James they would not renew it. Northern Songs without The Beatles would be like a vineyard that had finally dried up. Moreover, a permanent split could see the value of the company stock potentially crashing through the floor. And, in James’s view, they had sold their soul to a diabolical man who was the direct opposite of Brian and his impeccable manners and genteel disposition. Klein, with his spitball tactics and expletive-driven outbursts, was the last person on earth he wanted to do business with.
James’s path had often crossed that of Lew Grade during the Fifties, when the former was an aspiring crooner singing the theme tune to the popular British television show, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Grade was one of three pioneering brothers who formed a trident at the heart of British showbusiness. He ran Associated Television Ventures, a key plank of the ITV broadcasting network, and by the mid to late Sixties he was keen to expand the company’s portfolio. The two men had remained on friendly terms when Dick’s singing career faded and he went into music publishing.
Occasionally, Grade had thrown out a line to James about ATV buying Northern Songs. Enticing as they were, such overtures were always kicked into the long grass. Now, though, the landscape after Brian Epstein had been harshly redrawn. Midway through March, Dick James picked up the phone to call Lew Grade. Was he still interested in buying Northern Songs?
*
After their wedding, the Lennons had remained in Paris, hanging out with the likes of surrealist painter Salvador Dali and enjoying a degree of anonymity not afforded them in London or New York. Another sixteen years would pass before they would experience this inconspicuousness again.
Lennon was mulling over the idea of turning their nuptials into a song, ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’. It was, as he freely admitted, more rock ’n’ roll journalism than rock ’n’ roll music. But from now on that was how he planned to live his life with her. And to do that they would need to place themselves at the heart of the world’s media coverage. Their lives would become an open book for everyone to read. But how to do it . . . and for what purpose?
Lennon had long been identified as the maverick Beatle, a hero of the rapidly growing counterculture. The Cold War stand-off between America and Russia continued to stoke global tensions, but it was the Vietnam War and the burgeo
ning peace movement that would give the Lennons their most influential platform. The Beatles had long opposed the war between the Communist-backed Vietcong and the pro-Western Vietnamese Army, in the process trampling over Brian Epstein’s diktat to avoid all things political. ‘We didn’t like the war and we told Brian that,’ he recalled. In 1968, students had rioted on the streets of Washington, Belgrade, Berlin, Boston and Paris in protest at the war. There had been violent clashes between police and demonstrators at that year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The world’s youth – or at least those in the West – were searching for a leader who could rally them together against political repression.
Peter Watkins had urged the Lennons to use their fame for something more meaningful than selling records. Lennon had been further spurred by an encounter in Paris with a Dutchman called Hans Boskamp, who worked for a record company and who talked him into holding a peace protest in Amsterdam. Boskamp recalled: ‘He was incredibly preoccupied with the Vietnam War. When he said to me, “I want to do something, demonstrate against the war,” I said, “Then you should go to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, the Flower Power movement is in full swing.” “That’s a good idea,” he said.’
And so early in the morning of Tuesday, 25 March, having a few days earlier summoned chauffeur Les Anthony to bring the white Rolls-Royce from London to the French capital, John and Yoko checked out of their hotel and drove to Amsterdam, a city Lennon had not been in since 1964. Apple had already sent an advance notice to the hotel telling them to expect a VIP and requesting the presidential suite on the fifth floor for a week. But they were completely unprepared for the day the Lennon circus hit town. Within minutes of their arrival, the Lennons had sent postcards to the local and international media inviting them to come the next day with the promise of ‘a happening’. The press quickly joined the dots: John and Yoko in bed on honeymoon. It could only add up to one thing, couldn’t it? After all, they had already appeared naked on the front of their first album. And this was Amsterdam, the anything-goes permissive capital of Europe.
John was shrewdly aware of how the ‘bed-in’ concept might titillate a voyeuristic media with its implicit promise of sexual exhibitionism. It guaranteed one thing – an audience. Of course the media fell for it. The next day dozens of journalists and photographers laid siege to room 902 in the hope of seeing the newly-weds taking Yoko’s concept of performance art to a salacious new level. What they found were two people with beatific smiles dressed in neatly pressed pyjamas, each clenching a rose and announcing that they would be staying in bed for a week to promote world peace. In case they missed the point, crude hand-drawn posters with the words ‘Bed Peace’ and ‘Hair Peace’ were tacked onto the windows. Lennon’s conversion from cynical rock star to St John the Peace Evangelist raised plenty of eyebrows within his inner circle, but his altered image seemed real enough to those who had noticed a change in him despite the borderline warfare at Apple. Peter Brown said, ‘We hoped that John’s pacifist stand would deflect some of the hostility that John and Yoko were experiencing in the press but characteristically John made peace a holy crusade and turned his honeymoon into a side show.’
The posters in the room were a play on words for Yoko’s own art shows such as the one titled ‘Cut Piece’, which invited members of the public to take a pair of scissors to her clothes. But Lennon knew he had tapped into the zeitgeist, and the charge was electrifying. He had learned that when the mass media takes an idea, they will amplify and simplify it. So he and Yoko realised that a message needed to be uncomplicated, yet novel and provocative.
Hour after hour, day after day, they fielded any questions from reporters and, in so doing, they shifted the debate from what level of American bombing of Vietnam was acceptable to the broader issue of war versus peace.
Lennon explained: ‘We thought, the other side has war on TV every day, not only on the news but on the old John Wayne movies and every damn movie you see: war, war, war, war, war, kill, kill, kill, kill. We said: “Let’s get some peace, peace, peace, peace in the headlines, just for a change.” We thought it highly amusing that a lot of the world’s headlines on 25 March 1969 were “Honeymoon Couple In Bed”. Whoopee! Isn’t that great news? So we would sell OUR product, which we call peace. And to sell a product you need a gimmick, and the gimmick we thought was “bed”. And we thought “bed” because bed was the easiest way of doing it because we’re lazy.
‘It took us a long train of thought of hope to get the maximum publicity for what we sincerely believed in, which was peace.’
Keenly aware that they were being mocked worldwide, Lennon said, self-deprecatingly, ‘We are happy to be the world’s clowns . . . we stand a better chance under that guise, because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot.’ Yoko, asked if she would be a dutiful wife, responded: ‘No, but if that means bringing him his slippers all the time, I shall just do what I have to do.’
Lennon’s antics raised the ire of those on the left and the right of the political spectrum. To the left, his pacifism seemed misplaced; they had never forgotten his uneasy compromise on his White Album song, ‘Revolution’, in which he had warned that he would never be an advocate of violence as a blunt tool to right the world’s wrongs.
But if the left was hostile, the establishment press was outraged by the bed-ins. ‘This must rank as the most self-indulgent demonstration of all time,’ one Daily Express columnist wrote. To John and Yoko, for whom the bed-ins were deeply personal, the stark criticism cut to the bone.
Among their visitors was Fraser Watson, a member of an Apple-signed Scottish band, White Trash, who recalled their reactions to some of the more vicious media comments.
‘It was very hurtful to them,’ Watson told me. ‘They genuinely thought they were doing a good thing. And remember this was the ultimate peaceful protest. There was no harm in it whatsoever. No one got arrested and no one got hurt, so what was the problem? So they gave people a laugh. When was that ever a crime?
‘The amazing thing to me was how easy it was to get into the room. We just turned up because we had been appearing on this Dutch TV show but had run out of money. So we knew if we could get to John we could get to Apple and at least get enough money to bring us back home. He was in great form. He seemed genuine enough to me when he was going on about peace. But you try saying the same things twenty-four hours a day for six or seven days. It’s bound to come across as a bit cynical but I have no doubt whatsoever that John and Yoko were totally sincere in what they were doing.’
Amidst all the earnestness, there were moments of levity. Scottish journalist Rick Wilson was working for a magazine in Amsterdam when he got the call to head to the Hilton. He recalled the scene before him in the Guardian in 2017: ‘To be honest, I didn’t understand then, and still don’t, what that now-legendary “bed-in” was all about. It was to do with spreading a message of peace, but there were also undertones of helping the world’s less fortunate, which didn’t gel with John and Yoko’s arrival in a white Rolls-Royce and their week-long stay in that citadel of American capitalism, the Hilton Hotel.
‘There were about thirty of us, reporters and cameramen, summoned up to room 902, which looked out on to the roofs of a less colourful residential part of Amsterdam. Both dressed in pyjamas, John and Yoko were sitting on a big bed looking remarkably like each other. The Dutch may be extremely good at languages, and particularly English, but they are shy about showing the level of their proficiency to each other. So I ended up asking many of the questions in an attempt to find out what this was all about.
‘ “Why Amsterdam?” “It could have been anywhere really,” said John. “But this is just one of those cities, you know. The youth thing and all that. And the beds here aren’t bad at all . . .” “Why not Saigon or Dallas if peace is the cause?” “Because I’m dead scared of Saigon or Dallas. There’s less chance of getting shot or crucified here.” “Why the hair theme?” ‘We intend to grow our hair e
ven longer for the peace cause. Everybody should do it, all over the world – if only to bring about more awareness. But we’re doing it with a sense of humour, too, because we think the world needs to laugh more.” “Yes, people should first take their pants down before they start fighting,” added Yoko.’
Although nothing was off limits, questions about The Beatles remained largely below the radar. Enquiries about their future were largely straight-batted by Lennon, who repeatedly gave the impression that his old gang were – clear business difficulties aside – still united under a common flag.
Three days into the bed-in, however, peace and love gave way to something darker. Lennon, a voracious newspaper reader, had ordered a number of British publications for his room every day. On 28 March, his eye was drawn to a Financial Times headline: ‘ATV takes control of Northern Songs’. ‘Uncle’ Dick James had secretly sold his stake in the Lennon and McCartney songbook to Lew Grade.
Lennon was outraged at what he considered the worst kind of betrayal, perpetrated by two old men in suits.
Back in London, James was braced for the reactions. Unlike Clive Epstein, who was a member of Northern Songs’ board because of the small shareholding Nems held in the company, James no longer felt loyalty to the band that had given him a millionaire’s lifestyle. Dissent and mistrust had long ago fractured his relationship with Lennon and McCartney, so he reckoned he was entitled to map out a perfectly legal pathway to free himself from an increasingly bitter marriage.
The ATV deal had been worked out several days earlier. Both parties had arrived for discussions with their lawyers in the expectation of bruising negotiations. In the end, James and Grade comfortably agreed a price for the shareholding in his name and that of his business partner/accountant, Charles Silver. Grade recalled: ‘I just said, “Let’s settle this between us.” In the end we agreed everything over a cup of tea. When the lawyers came in it was all done.’
